GNOME Python Hackfest

GNOME Python Hackfest

founder:

GNOME Foundation

date/time:

17.1.2011 - 21.1.2011

place:

brmlab

stream:

On the third week of January we'll hold a GNOME Python Hackfest at our hackerspace. Nine top-hackers involved in GNOME and Python communities will hack for 5 days in order to adapt Python bindings to the new GNOME 3.0 API.

See GNOME wiki for more information about the agenda. They will also hold two talks during the hackfest:

Wed 19.1.2011 19:00OLPC and Sugar
(Tomeu Vizoso & Simon Schampijer)

The One Laptop Per Child initiative has been working on improving the educational opportunities of children from all around the world since 2005. The organization designs and produces machines and software specifically aimed to this goal, while also supporting the institutions that deliver and maintain the project on the field. As of January 2011, more than 1.5 million machines have been delivered to more than 15 countries.

Sugar is an immersive user experience that is used in educational projects such as OLPC. The main design goal is to maximize the chances of learning and does so through clarity, providing good affordances for collaboration and estimulating the production and critique of content. It is a Free Software project with a diverse community with members from all around the world.

This talk will introduce both projects and explain their current states and perspectives of future.

PyGObject, the Python bindings for GObject, has been an important part of the GNOME community almost from the beginning of the project. Back when it was known as PyGTK+ it was one of the first scripting libraries to be fully supported for writing GNOME applications. Today PyGTK+ and PyGObject form the basis of many popular Linux distributions including Fedora and Ubuntu, both of who's installers and administration tools are written in Python. Going a step forward, the Sugar distribution used by the One Laptop Per Child project is almost completely based off of Python. In 2010, with the big push for GNOME 3.0 and the fact that PyGTK+'s lead developer had moved on to help write the JavaScript bindings for GNOME, the future of PyGTK+ and PyGObject were in question.

This talk will go through the history of the Python bindings for GTK+ along with how the Foundation helped keep the project going even after the main developers had left the project. We will talk about the decisions made to keep the project a continued success and how organizations such as Brmlab help us in our ongoing mission.